Marching Powder

By Rod BeechamJuly 26 2003

Marching PowderBy Rusty YoungMacmillan, 372pp, $30

Thomas McFadden is an Englishman who was convicted of cocaine trafficking by a Bolivian court in 1995. He spent the next four years and eight months in San Pedro prison in La Paz. Marching Powder is the story of his time in jail.

McFadden was taken to San Pedro by taxi in the company of two policemen who grew very angry when they discovered he did not have the money for the fare. They took him to a prison officer, who told McFadden to pay an entrance fee and to "buy" his cell. This officer then produced a large blue book containing a list of the cells currently for sale.

When McFadden later tried to explain this to a visiting official from the British embassy, he was not believed. "But that is preposterous, Mr McFadden! You do not mean to tell me that prisoners must pay to be incarcerated by the state and, furthermore, that they are obliged to purchase their own housing within the penitentiary facility?"

As McFadden says, "the further I got into the description, the more ridiculous it sounded, especially when I started talking about getting witnesses' signatures for transfers of cell titles".

Money, in all its dehumanising oppressiveness, infests the narrative to the point where you want to scream, if only to shatter your way out of an atrocious nightmare. If it weren't for an older inmate named Ricardo, McFadden would have died after only a few days in the prison. He slept in the open because he couldn't afford a cell. He was coughing blood, but the prison doctor refused to treat him because he couldn't pay. The prison pharmacy would not give him medicine without payment. But Ricardo took McFadden to his own cell and lent him what he needed until he was well.

Thanks to the assistance of the organisation Prisoners Abroad, McFadden was able, after some time on Ricardo's floor, to obtain money for his own cell. He was threatened and beaten a lot in the early days because he was a gringo, but he found that acting tough and fighting back - as well as making it known that he was English, not American - were effective ways to avoid persecution. His emergency credit card arrived from Europe and, for a fee, one of Ricardo's trusted friends on the outside would get cash advances from an ATM.

McFadden now cultivated the prison governor. With money to pay bribes (petrol for the governor's car, his household electricity bill and school uniforms for his children) and win friends and the respect of most of the inmates, McFadden became a force in San Pedro.

He conducted tours of the prison for foreign travellers after, of course, an appropriate payment to the officers at the gate, and these tours became famous on the South American backpacking circuit. This is how Rusty Young heard of McFadden and came to meet him.

It seems strange that Young is credited with the authorship of this book, as almost all of it appears to be transcript of McFadden's own words. The absence of Young, who is neither character nor commentator, and the text's failure to reproduce McFadden's oft-asserted charm mean that the frequently horrifying narrative lacks the moral dimension that would have given it enduring power.

Marching Powder is presented as McFadden's story, unfiltered by Rusty Young, but it is perhaps more useful to think of it as a critique of unbridled capitalism.

Rod Beecham, a former literary editor of The Independent Monthly, is a freelance reviewer.